From John Cheever to William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway to Elmore Leonard, some of literature's biggest names were notorious drunks. Sure, that's no secret--open any one of Hemingway's books and you can almost smell the alcohol wafting from the text--but did heavy drinking really help them write?

In America William Faulkner and Scott Fitzgerald were the Paris and Britney of their day, caught in the funhouse mirror of fame, their careers a vivid tabloid mash-up of hospitalisations and electroshock therapies. "When I read Faulkner I can tell when he gets tired and does it on corn just as I used to be able to tell when Scott would hit it beginning with 'Tender is the Night'," said Hemingway, playing the Amy Winehouse role of denier-in-chief. He kept gloating track of his friends' decline, all the while nervously checking out books on liver damage from the library; by the end, said George Plimpton, Hemingway's liver protruded from his belly "like a long fat leech".

In fact none of these authors would write much that was any good beyond the age of 40, Faulkner's prose seizing up with sclerosis, Hemingway sinking into unbudgeable mawkishness. When Fitzgerald went public about his creative decline in Esquire, in a piece entitled "The Crack Up"--a prototype for all the misery memoirs we have today--Hemingway was disgusted, inviting him to cast his "balls into the sea--if you have any balls left". Today, of course, "The Crack Up" would be shooting up the besteller lists, and Fitzgerald would be sat perched on Oprah's couch talking about his struggle and his co-dependent relationship with Ernest, proudly wearing his 90-day sobriety chip, but in the 1930s, the recovery industry, then in its infancy, was regarded by most with the enthusiasm of a cat approaching a bathtub.

So maybe all the alcohol made them too tired and hungover to write. Or maybe the alcohol has a way of refocusing your interest. Take Truman Capote, for instance: another lush, he died--of liver disease, no less--nearly twenty years after publishing his final book, In Cold Blood. And then there's the case of Stephen King--who did his best work (Salem's Lot, The Shining, and, most notably, The Stand) over thirty years ago, and while under the influence:

Certainly, for those who trade a little too heavily on darkness, the Ozzy Osbournes of the literary world, the transition can be a rocky one. Stephen King says he cannot remember writing "Cujo", he was so loaded; but after his family staged an intervention in 1987, emptying the contents of his garbage onto his living-room floor--cocaine, beer cans, Xanax, NyQuil, Valium, marijuana--he quit, and the result was a marked slackening of tension in his work. One of the things that made "The Shining" such a great novel about falling off the wagon was that King didn't know that was what it was about--it was written from inside the belly of an obsession. Once he worked out what the real monster in the closet was, his work took on a therapeutic air, more concerned with the exorcising of internal demons than supernatural ones; it became baggier too, as if the elimination of one indulgence had forced a sideways move into another: the writing became drinking by other means.

So: To drink or not to drink? Good question. It depends on the writer, but sober or no, we're really talking about an author's decline and fall. Harper Lee certainly knew about this, and avoided it in the only way possible: when her cousin, Richard Williams, asked when she'd write her second novel, Lee replied, "Richard, when you're at the top, there's only one way to go."